Miracle children Race, education, and a true story of false promises

Expanding on their 2018 New York Times article on the T. M. Landry College Preparatory scandal, authors Green and Benner explore the lies, abuse, and manipulation of the high-school's founders, Mike and Tracey Landry. The Landrys founded the school in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, in 2005 after discovering that their son was passing exams yet struggling to read at his grade level. By 2017, Landry College Prep boasted of more than 100 students with acceptances to colleges like Harvard and Yale, but the Landrys were facing accusations of abuse, falsifying grades, and mismanaging funds. Miracle Children is part narrative, including firsthand accounts of former students, and part history lesson, weaving in background information on the education system in Louisiana. This additional context helps readers better understand the actions taken by the students, their families, and the Landrys, all trying to work against the exclusive legacy system of elite American colleges. This engaging and well-researched book would be a great read for anyone interested in modern American education and history.

Falsified transcripts, embellished college essays, and draconian disciplinary tactics were among the shadowy practices at T.M. Landry, a college preparatory school in Louisiana once widely acclaimed for helping at-risk Black youth get into elite colleges, according to this razor-sharp investigation. New York Times journalists Benner and Green (Five Days) trace the school from its founding in 2005 by Tracey and Mike Landry to its development into a "sought after educational experience." The school gained national recognition with its viral videos of Black students ecstatically receiving Ivy League acceptance letters. But the authors reveal T.M. Landry's underbelly of deception, fraud, physical abuse, and cultlike control tactics such as making underperforming students "kneel in circle while other children hurled criticism at them." The school also prioritized "gaming the system," only teaching students how to take standardized tests, which left them woefully behind academically. The authors explore how the education system laid the groundwork for the Landrys' scam, from Louisiana's lack of oversight for private schools--a holdover from resistance to desegregation--to U.S. colleges' reliance on "feeder schools." Most disconcerting is that the Landrys' own diagnosis of the education system's problem--"that elite white institutions wanted only broken black people"--proved accurate. It's a damning look at the continued impact of race on educational opportunities in America. (Jan.)

How a "school's deception illuminated the persistence of a racial caste system." TwoNew York Times reporters invite readers to look under the hood, so to speak, of a small private school in Louisiana that placed poor Black children into the country's top schools. Relying on dozens of interviews with students, parents, and staff who were willing to go on the record, the authors share many troublesome findings about the T.M. Landry College Prep, founded by Tracey and Mike Landry. "In texts and whispered exchanges, students talked about the abuse they suffered at T.M. Landry," the authors write. "But they still did not tell authorities or other adults. They assumed this was the price they had to pay for a shot at the kind of life they thought was out of reach." The book tells of a host of enablers, including college admissions staff--who were eager to believe "tales of black suffering" that fit a clichéd narrative--and the state of Louisiana, which has no mechanism for oversight of private schools. In a clear and nuanced account, the authors dig deep into the schools' red flags. They describe the tension between the ideal of personal responsibility and the structural inequities in American society. The playing field of college admissions is ripe for manipulation: "The most elite institutions admit a tiny fraction of applicants, making the pressure to exaggerate, embellish, lie, and cheat on college applications relatively common." This explains why so many families chose to stick with the program even after the authors published their exposé in theTimes. The authors write, "What Mike and Tracey gave [the students] was a set of connections and a time-tested playbook, created in service of the American aristocracy, for acceptance to the Ivy League." In other words, the school promised results in a Byzantine system that the families knew they couldn't navigate on their own. An alarming story of a private school that achieved improbable outcomes. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.